Railfan Technology > OK, What am I doing wrong?

I have been working with Photoshop for a short eon. Recently, I added a few plugins from Topaz. The images look great on the screen. The colours pop, the detail is there. I go and post them on TO and they look like refried dogcrap. The colour is blah if not worse.

Image #1 has been processed using Topaz
Image #2 has been processed Photoshop CS5

Any ideas?

Tusen Takk!

Yukon Yeti

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There's a rumor that if you let the TrainOrders compression software take care of your file during uploading some of the fine points, details, sharpness and colors are somehow changed.

To get around that make your own 'dimension' selection to less that 1000 pixels so that the TO software does not try to compress it. ie: when using the 'Websized' or 'compress for e-mail' selection on your desktop, chose dimensions of the image to be 1000 pixels maximum. The other dimension should follow automatically, is that was linked in some earlier table. If you free hand the two dimensions (ie 'Custom' cropping selection) then this will get messed up, technically speaking.

I'm real curious if this works or is just another Urbane Legend. I think 'we' found this by comparing small file sizes to large files that became compressed.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/31/14 14:19 by TCnR.

That would be fine, except the two images I used as examples are roughly the same size. The only difference being the use of Topaz plugins used to manipulate the file. (the dull one) I manually resized both images to 1200 x 696. Can't blame TO at this time.

Image 1 without Topaz
Image 2 with Topaz

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On second thought, we may have something here. The Topaz file is 2mb in size, the non Topaz is puny in comparison. There may be something to this old wives tale about TO doing a number on the image..

Tusen takk !

Are you doing something with the color?...like auto correct. I think we would like to see them right out of the camera. I use just microsoft office photos to change file size and do nothing with color.
Keep tryin!
Roger Beckett

Forgot to mention the magic number seems to be 1000 pixels for the horizontal dimension. Rumor has it that if you manually reduce to that number the TO compression does not kick in.

It would be nice to hear about someone validating the rumor. I think I did but I'm known for out-thinking a topic.

They look like refried dogcrap on my monitor too Yeti! Ditch the plug-ins and stay with what has been working for you in the cave for the last eon!

KC

Well, let's experiment.

Here's a shot I took in 1980 at Riverside Junction. I scanned the slide on a high-end desktop slide/film scanner as a TIF. I resized the TIF in PS as a 1800 pixel wide/1.3 MB image (top), then again as a 1000 pixel wide/303 KB image (bottom). Both are posted here to see if the TO compression affects the larger one more than the small one. No filter plug-ins are involved.

Do you see a difference? It's not a great shot but I see little difference between the posted JPEGs even though TO resized the 1800px image to the 1000px maximum.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/31/14 23:20 by trainjunkie.

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Tried to find info on 'Topaz', DPReveiw has something but I couldn't get to the conclusion of the review. Every one else seems to think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Topaz apparently has packaged effects to correct issues with a photo, but I thought that was what PhotoShop was doing.

Apparently Topaz is some sort of a short cut?

I think I can see a difference in the hillside and the telephone pole, suggesting an effect on very small irregular details. It's not what I was expecting, or heard of. I don't see color shifts.

I'll try again in the morning...

trainjunkie Wrote:
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> Well, let's experiment.
>
> Here's a shot I took in 1980 at Riverside
> Junction. I scanned the slide on a high-end
> desktop slide/film scanner as a TIF. I resized the
> TIF in PS as a 1800 pixel wide/1.3 MB image (top),
> then again as a 1000 pixel wide/303 KB image
> (bottom). Both are posted here to see if the TO
> compression affects the larger one more than the
> small one. No filter plug-ins are involved.
>
> Do you see a difference? It's not a great shot but
> I see little difference between the posted JPEGs
> even though TO resized the 1800px image to the
> 1000px maximum.

It's still there, the wooden pole with the radio antenna for example. Also the YukonYeti photos show loss of edge detail in the foliage.

My understanding is the effect of compression would show in the edge of something, so an up close photo of a flat surface with square edges doesn't show loss of detail. The irregular edges would show loss of detail, such as trees and ballast. Something to do with removing the 'duplicate data', which would be 'easy' to do with a straight edge but not with an irregular edge like a tree. the compression removes duplicate data, the de-compression method is chosen to mimic the remaining data to make it look as it 'should'. So there could be differences in compression/de-compression methods.

The changes in color appear to be a different topic than the TO compression. Just my $0.02, I'd like to hear other opinions of this. I'm using a 23 inch display, I doubt any difference would be seen on a Tablet or Smartphone, so this could be moot for most folks.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compression



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/01/14 08:35 by TCnR.

TCnR Wrote:
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> The changes in color appear to be a different
> topic than the TO compression.

Agreed. That was the point of this experiment. The different compression algorithms may have created slight variances in artifacts, but the colors remained pretty much the same. The OP's images, on the other hand, had a wild color shift. I highly doubt that had anything to do with the TO compression algorithm.

...and there is a slight loss of detail. Which is not an issue with all straight edged subjects. If you're looking for outdoor-sey photos the rumor is still a rumor.

I think we shot down the idea of after-market add-ons though. They may work in specific conditions, not too concerned about what they are though.

My first thought was the color / icc profile... Is it included with the topaz shot? I can tweak the topaz shot easily enough to look fairly decent... And you know there is a color difference between the two shots: check out the roadbed / ballast... I'm seeing two different colors there... Here's a quick stab at correcting the shot.

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Out of the camera.. only sharpened it.. no colour correction.

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Minor colour adjustment in Topaz

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Started it life in Lightroom, to Photoshop, colour enhanced, denoised, sharpened.. Result is as you see it..

The late afternoon colour looks good to me.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/01/14 15:43 by YukonYeti.

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I don't understand what the advantage of Topaz is meant to be.

It seems that one of the PhotoShop products would take of the clean-up adjustments mentioned at a similar or less price.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/01/14 18:21 by TCnR.

Topaz does a nice job of taking out noise. It is a complement to Photoshop.... It has its uses.

I encountered the problem once when I uploaded pictures to TO using the Adobe RGB color space instead of the sRGB color space. They looked pretty dull (see http://www.trainorders.com/discussion/read.php?17,3393026,3393026#msg-3393026). All my other pictures having been uploaded in sRGB looked pretty good.

If you look at the first picture below, this one is in sRGB, while the second one is using the Adobe RGB color space. All other processing options have been the same and the size is 1920 px. You can see the color-deviation easily in the red of the locomotive.

Also, I'm using Topaz plug-ins to quite some extend and never noticed any difference in appearance.

E111



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/03/14 01:27 by E111.

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